Yes, languages get mistaken for each other all the time when one is not familiar with the writing system, and sometimes even when one is. I have struggled to understand posts in Spanish before realising they're actually in Portuguese, which I don't speak. (Also I'm pretty sure Norwegian and Danish are actually the same language).

Can you tell the difference between Telugu and Kannada just by looking at them? How about Arabic and Persian? How about Arabic and Ottoman Turkish? Persian and Kurdish? Yoruba and Xhosa? Ukrainian and Kazakh? Sumerian and Akkadian? Actually, could you tell the difference between Akkadian and Old Persian? They are both written with cuneiform characters, but the characters themselves are apparently as different as hiragana and hangul.

If your sentence is written entirely in Chinese characters, there is no way for somebody unfamiliar with them to determine whether it's Japanese, Mandarin, or Hokkien. And if somebody hasn't seen enough Japanese text to figure out the difference between kana and Chinese characters, they still won't be able to tell the difference.

As to why Google can't tell, Google doesn't actually understand anything. It's based on a massive database of which characters and combinations of characters come next to each other (and there's also some Markov stuff to account for common spelling mistakes). If your search string is made entirely of Chinese characters, it's going to get hits on websites written with Chinese characters, many of which will be in Mandarin. Google.com probably isn't able to detect your UI or browser language settings. To ensure you get results from Japan, try using google.jp instead, as it will prioritise Japanese results.

Found a source!

OK, so Disney licensed their characters to OpenAI for three years so they can be legally used in Sora-generated videos; I figure Disney gets a cut of OpenAI's revenue proportional to how often people use Disney's characters. This includes Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm in addition to core. The article says that some vetted Sora-generated videos will go up on Disney+ (so nothing violent or sexual). And apparently they'll be doing something with OpenAI's stuff on Disney+.

So it's a contract, but they didn't buy a company. Well there goes that hope.

Nintendo don't use generative LLMs because of the copyright issues. Disney are even more lawyertastic than Nintendo. Hopefully a small batallion of Disney's lawyers will show up at Squenix's offices and tell them to cut that crap out.

Business is good!

I have a banana in my garage because I'm happy to see you.

This has actually been tried. It's called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_currency](demurrage currency). Basically, every note decreases in value every week: in 1930s Austria, this was accomplished by requiring people to get regular stamps to keep their money good, but every stamp reduced the value of the note.

This encourages people to spend money instead of hoarding it, but the obvious downside is that it makes saving functionally impossible.

He was born in 1963, a time when the Netherlands were as car-focused as the USA. When Huang was a child, the number of parents killed by cars outraged Dutch parents, and they mounted a years-long protest campaign under the slogan "Stop murdering children" (but in Dutch). The protests were big enough that the government listened and changed Dutch transport infrastructure in major, fundamental ways. They built lots and lots of bike lames as well as investing heavily in buses and trains. The overall result was aaddive turn away from cars, and streets are once again safe fir children to play in.

It worked in the Netherlands when Huang was a child.

Excellent

$0. Because first and foremost, he is a goodie-two-shoes who wouldn't charge for it. And even if he was willing to charge, doing so would mean compromising his secret identity.

I'm a line worker in a factory, and I recently managed to give a presentation on "AI" to a group of office workers (it went well!). One of the people there is in regular contact with the C_Os but fortunately is pretty reasonable. His attitude is "We have this problem; what tools do we have to fix it", and so isn't impressed by " AI" yet. The C_Os, alas, insist it's the future. They keep hammering on at him to get everybody to integrate "AI" in their workflows, but they have no idea how to actually do that (let alone what the factory actually does), they just say "We have this tool, use it somehow".

The reasonable manager asked me how I would respond if a C_O said we would get left behind if we don't embrace " AI". I quipped that it's fine to be left behind when everybody else is running towards a cliff. I was pretty proud of that one.

Needing to log into an online account to play a single-player game.

When a single-player game keeps pausing to tell me it can't connect to the server.

Richard Dawkins: Men have penises and make sperm, women have wombs and make ova. That is objective truth. If you lack a vagina you cannot be referred to as she/her, and if you lack a penis you cannot be referred to as he/him.\ Also Richard Dawkins: This network of silicon and fibre optic cables running a fractal Markov chain is clearly a woman who one should obviously refer to as she/her.

(Paraphrasing a quip by @2something@transfem.social)

[https://acoup.blog/...(The optimum is no chain at all).

A flail is a really bad weapon. The chain makes it difficult to control, puts you at great risk of hitting yourself, while not giving you any reach advantage. Real flails were medieval agricultural tools that were sometimes used as improvised weapons, but if you had access to an axe or spear, you would use that. If you have a big spiky ball of iron, it's much more effective to put it at the end of a rigid wooden staff and whack people with it that way; in other words, a mace is strictly better.

That said, real chain-based weapons do have their uses. The lkusarigama is made by attaching a sickle to a wooden handle with a long chain. It is used to entangle and disarm your opponent, at which point you can close in and slash them with the sickle end. Since it involves swinging a sickle on the end of a long chain, it would never be used in pitched battle lest you hit your comrades, and in any case spears are more useful when armies clash. However, kusarigamas were quite handy in one-on-one combat; since they were easy to conceal and could be disguised as agricultural tools, they were primarily used by ninjas and city guards

So to give an answer to your question, if you're going to use a chain-based weapon, the optimum length is long enough to completely wrap around somebody. And in that situation, you want a fairly light, small business end, not a big metal ball.

A bunch of Protestants think the Pope is the Antichrist, but apparently Vance identifies as Catholic, so yeah, he's defying God. Catholic doctrine also holds that the Pope is infallible when ruling on theology.

I'm sorry, I thought this was Cards Against Humanity.

The terms themselves are somewhat vague and slippery. Marx and Engels used them interchangeably. The USSR and China really tainted the word communism, which is why socialism is much more common nowadays.

As I understand it, communism is a form of socialism. Socialism is ultimately about worker control over the means of production, rather than private capital. As such, socialists inherently support strong unions, and the sensible ones also support social welfare, minimum wage, and basic income so that business owners have less leverage to exploit their workers.

If you just take workers' rights to it logical conclusio, you get market socialism. This is an economic system in which all privately-owned (including publicly-traded) companies are replaced with worker-owned coöperatives, which still compete in a market.

Communism goes further. Self-identified communists will tell you that communism is a moneyless. classless, stateless society where the means of production are held in common by those who use them. If this sounds like anarchism, it basically is.

However, communists in the 20th century were mostly vamguardists. This idea, pioneered by Lenin, advocates for a vanguard of smarties who understand communism to overthrow the government and impose communism from the top down, fixing the system on behalf of those workers too stupid to join the revolution. Workers who did not support the revolution would see that everything was much better with the communist vanguard in charge, and would embrace communism. If a few insisted on being counterrevolutionary, they would just need to be reëducated.

The Russian Revolution was heavily criticised by anarchists at the time, on the grounds that if the revolution does not rise from below, it is simply a coup that makes Lenin an uncrowned tsar. They were correct, and thus the word communism was utterly tainted in the capitalist world to refer to oppressive dictatotships that are (nominally) anticapitalist.

For what it's worth, Lenin himself described the USSR as state capitalist, whereby the state ran all industry on behalf of the workers until the workers came around to the glorious revolutionaries' perspective. Because those in.power never want to relinquish it, the ruling soviet aggressively cracked down on and suppressed trade unions, because organised workers were a threat not only to capitalists, but also to the nominally communist government. To maintain a veneer of being about the workers, farms and factories were administered by soviets vetted and approved by the government, who could be guaranteed to operate as the government wanted.

It's actually standard practice for secret agents to use their real names, as accidentally failing to respond to a pseudonym is one if the easiest ways to blow their cover.

Furthermore, Bond is a secret agent. The fact that he's a spy who has tons if amazing adventures is not public knowledge, let alone well-known. We the audience know James Bond as a super-popular action hero from a long series of movies, but in his own universe there is nothing particularly special or noteworthy about the name James Bond.

In ancient times, people did not have the concept of a "civil day"; they viewed day and night as separate things which alternated.

The Assyrians divided the day into six equal parts, and the night into six equal parts, called ush. But because sunrise and sunset move around over the course of the year, the lengths of day and night vary, and thus one ush during the day would not be the same length as an ush at night except around the equinoxes.

The Babylonians divided ushes in two to make hours, because it was easier to do astronomy in 12s than 6es. This resulted in 12 hours in a day and 12 hours at night, but daytime hours were still different lengths to nighttime hours, and the lengths of hours still varied over the course of the year.

The Greeks partially adopted the Babylonian system; they divided the day into 12 hours but the night was divided into four watches. The Romans copied the Greek system, but later went full Babylonian with 12 hours at night as well. (I feel like this coïncided with the rise of Christianity, but I have no evidence). The Romans introduced the concept of the civil day beginning at midnight (which the Chinese independently came up with), and over time, this led to the idea of 12 hours from midnight to noon, and 12 hours from noon to midnight. That idea postdates Rome, however; Roman hours were reckoned from sunrise to sunset and sunset to sunrise.

Assyrian astronomical knowledge seems to have reached China via India, as traditional Chinese timekeeping divides the civil day into 12 shi. Ancient shi were like Assyrian ushes; they were either 1/6 of a day or 1/6 of a night. Originally, midnight and noon fell in the middle of a shi, but this was changed to shi starting at midnight to make administration and astronomy easier. This system of variable-length shi continued to be used in Japan until about the Meiji Restoration.

Fixed-length hours are the result of analogue clocks, which are impractical to design to change the lengths of hours with the seasons (but not impossible; the wskusei clock is an ingenious Japanese clock from the 17th century that does exactly that). China had reliable, accurate water clocks by the Tang dynasty, while Europeans developed circular mechsnical clocks in the late Middle Ages. In neither case was it practical to make something as clever as the wakusei clock, so analogue clocks were marked the mean length of a shi or an hour as a reasonable approximation. Since there are 12 hours from midnight to noon and 12 from noon to midnight, that led to the 12-hour time system we know today.

Relevant xkcd